I was looking forward to “The Women,” but I could tell from the first scene that this updated remake of the 1939 classic by “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English – who would seem ideally suited to the job – was a total disaster.
“There’s a name for women like that that’s rarely used outside a kennel,” says one character in a line cribbed from the original, and you have to scratch your head.
“Bitch” wasn’t used on-screen in 1939 and probably not onstage in 1936, when Clare Booth Luce introduced her farce about a group of bitchy Manhattan women on Broadway with an all-female cast, a concept retained for the movie.
Today, you can hear the word at all hours on TV – not that there are any bitches in English’s declawed version of “The Women,” which is a drearily neutered tale of empowerment among aging, upscale women that makes the film version of “Sex and the City” look positively edgy.
Meg Ryan, looking like a cartoon version of herself from 15 years ago – when she first signed on for the role – is naive Connecticut resident Mary Haines, whose stockbroker husband has just left her for gold-digging Crystal, who works at the perfume counter at Saks.
Crystal was played in 1939 by Joan Crawford, and a good part of what makes the 1939 “The Women” such fun is the real-life enmity between Crawford and the actress who played Mary: Norma Shearer, queen of the MGM lot.
A severely miscast Eva Mendes – she looks great, but she just isn’t mean enough – has inherited Crawford’s role, which has been much cut back so as to build up the part of Sylvie (nee Sylvia) Fowler, who just can’t resist gossiping about her best friend’s misfortune.
This supporting role, which made Rosalind Russell a star, now belongs to Annette Bening, who this time around is a struggling magazine editor. (Mary, who still has a young daughter, works as a fashion designer for her never-seen father.)
English finds it necessary to justify Sylvie’s betrayal – she’s blackmailed by a Page Six reporter (Carrie Fisher) who threatens to publish an unflattering piece about Sylvie’s problems with her staff. The movie thus becomes about whether Mary can ever forgive the much older-looking Sylvie – rather than whether Mary will triumph over Crystal.
Guess which one is a lot more fun to watch?
There are lines from the original script by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin dropped in here and there, but they fit awkwardly at best in the new feminist context. And English’s directing debut is as flat as her screenplay.
In the biggest crime of all, English has cut the funniest sequence in the 1939 movie – a hair-pulling fight at a Western dude ranch – and substituted a trip to a spa in the Berkshires where a jaded Hollywood agent (a cameoing Bette Midler) lectures Mary on looking out for No. 1.
There is actually a lot of tiresome lecturing going on here, much of it coming from English’s old “Murphy Brown” star Candice Bergen, who scores most of the very scarce laughs as Mary’s mom.
Bergen, who also played Ryan’s mom in “Rich & Famous” back during the Reagan administration, also gets stuck with the movie’s most grotesque scene, set in a plastic surgeon’s office.
I really don’t want to talk about the oddness of casting Ryan in a movie that complains about women being forced to update their appearance. Then I’d have to talk about the even bigger irony of putting the actress (whose perkiness is way past the expiration date) in a movie about marital infidelity.
The 1939 “The Women” had an all-star cast that included Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard, among others. But English has little idea of what to do with, say, Debra Messing as a woman with many children. Jada Pinkett Smith’s sole function as an African-American lesbian is to extend the movie’s demographic reach.
“The Women” was actually remade before. That was in 1956, as a musical, with June Allyson and Joan Collins battling over Leslie Nielsen (yes, there were men in that one). This latest version manages to be even more pointless – no easy feat.
THE WOMEN
What a bitch.
Running time: 116 minutes. Rated PG- 13 (profanity, sexuality). At the Empire, the Orpheum, the Chelsea, others.